I currently have installed in my VMWARE enviorment , VMWARE disaster recovery appliance which is doing a full backup of my VDMK files and these are being stored locally on my SAN.

I introduced this appliance to another buddy of mine who has a simliar enviorment and he took it one step further and has his VMWARE Disaster recovery appliance pointed to a different network share that is across his WAN in another city. He now has a backup copy of his VDMK files in a remote site in case his site. If his site "A" primary site were to get blown over, burned down etc. I assume he can bring those VDMK files alive at site "B"

What is VEEAM doing so differently than the VMWARE disastery recovery appliance?

5 Replies

Veeam can operate on a lot more schedule's and granularity. Veeam has built in testing of backups (Surebackup) as well as the ability to run from the compressed/deduped backup (PowerNFS). Veeam can run with multiple data movers (Backup proxy's) and multiple media servers in multiple locations and do pre or post dedupe depending on your wire seed. Veeam will rewrite IP's ON VMs if its a failover site on your VM's. Veeam media servers can talk straight to storage from physical hosts (Direct SAN mode). VEEAM can with a limited disruption migrate a running VM between hosts without shared storage. Veeam has application hooks so you can restore mailboxes SQL databases and more than just files from it. Veeam offers reverse incremental backups so your last restore point is always a full so you have faster recovery. Veeam can throttle backups, as well as do near continuous backup options.

Veeam also bundles in monitoring software, and reporting and charge back tools with some of their software bundles.

Most importantly VEEAM scales up and out, and is being developed to challenge Symantec and ARC and everyone else. VMware created VDR as a stopgap for people who don't have a virtual first backup strategy.

- Disclaimer while I am a partner of both VMware and Veeam I have only installed VDR twice. Overall it was easy to deploy, and did what the clients wanted, but I've only seen it deployed where clients were still using something else for application and file backups.

I am still using my (disk-to-disk solution with tape) unfortunately which is doing my flat file copies, I was mostly courious about the VDMKs!

The problem with just copying the VMDK Flat files is you don't have information regarding what order to put them back together (if there are multiple ones because of a snapshot) and the VMDK files that erference them hard reference file paths in VMFS (so moving to a new cluster that doesn't have exactly the same naming structure is going to be a problem). The VMX contains the actual configuration and boot order of the VM. While you can rebuild a VM from flat files, its kind of a pain and half the time it involves me with a text editor rewriting VMDK files and the VMX.

VEEAM magically does all this for you and registers it with the cluster.